Posts by Keir Leslie
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All the non-coalition parties form the opposition. Labour gets more questions because they’re allocated proportionately. Blame the lazy media who still refer to “the Opposition spokesperson”.
This is wrong. For instance Shearer is Leader of the Opposition.
(Arguably difference between o/Opposition, but also there are functions which attach to being largest bloc of non-gov't MPs.)
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And I am an occasional recreational cyclist, albeit one who rides on the footpath wherever possible.
Grah, this is actually more dangerous! It is unusual to be hit while going straight along a road. Most accidents, as always, happen at intersections. And drivers don't expect cyclists to emerge from the footpath!
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Also, should be noted that people aren't very good judges of what's risky behaviour when cycling, and they can't be expected to be*. It's the old thing: design systems for people, not people for systems.
* Beyond some pretty obvious stuff, like not running red lights ffs, it's stupid and lethal. When you run a red light you do something unexpected, and that's when people die.
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Meh, I think trying to parse that bit of the Regulations too closely is mad. The law is deficient if it doesn't allow for the incredibly common case of cyclists moving on the far left of a road at a speed sometimes slower and sometimes greater than the other traffic. Someone should fix that.
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It is getting worse. A year or two ago I heard an interview with a professor from VUW’s music school. As an experiment in the first class he’d play his first-year students music in a range of formats, with a range of engineering treatments. It was the tinny mp3 which they liked the best, because their ears were most accustomed to it.
Yeah, but if people like it, then surely saying worse is slightly tendentious. It might just be a thing you don’t like.
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Degrading and mind-numbing? It is possible to work on a factory floor and feel pride in what you do.
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Once all these people start being laid off and sent back to the farm, what will they do? They don’t have any employment protection, they don’t have the right to stay in the cities without jobs and they don’t have the outlet of voteocracy to vent their frustration by voting the other team in.
Well, there’s always the Mass Group Incident. And the strike. (The making of the Chinese working class, and all that.) And while yeah, they don’t have residence permits, the notion of deporting millions of people is pretty ludicrous.
And why should growth stop? There’s a massive emerging Asian middle class that will want these things.
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China is an industrialising nation. New Zealanders probably don't have the same idea of what that means as Europeans or Americans, because New Zealand never industrialised; we were always industrial. But these stories out of China are not very different from the industrialising American West, when Southern blacks moved en masse to Detroit and Chicago, or the industrialising of Europe, when (for example) large parts of the Irish peasantry moved to Liverpool and Glasgow.
Many of those jobs were awful. But on the other hand, so's being a peasant.
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Everyone who gets bail is at some risk of flight or reoffending. That has to be weighed against the right not to be jailed without conviction.
Um, yes, everyone is a flight risk to some extent. But very few people appearing before New Zealand courts are millionaires with hidden bank accounts, multiple passports, a strong incentive to flee, and so-on. There are degrees of risk, and he's at the high end. Seriously: if you think that isn't possible to reasonably consider Dotcom isn't a flight risk, who can you consider a flight risk?
And you know, his associates thought it was likely he'd take the money and run. It's not like it wouldn't be attractive to fly to Germany in order to avoid years in the US prison system, even if it did mean losing a lot of money.
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The judgement on bail seems well within reason. Surely it must be reasonable to think that a man with passports in multiple names, with hidden bank accounts in false names, a safe bolthole that won't extradite him to the USA, and so-on, is a flight risk. After all, if he isn't, who on earth is?